Current communications systems are being stressed due to the ever increasing demand for greater bandwidth to handle evolving communications needs. More and more, telecommunications systems are evolving to meet these needs by employing optical signaling systems, which employ optical fiber and specialized optical circuits and components.
The creation of such optical components has become a time consuming and expensive proposition. The optical fibers and optical circuits manufactured today are microscopic in size, where typical optical waveguides feature a cross-section of but a few microns in diameter.
Due to the size of optical waveguides and optical circuitry and other factors, current processes employed in their manufacture can be very costly and labor intensive. With regard to particular components employed to couple a guided wave from one optical waveguide to a detector or another waveguide, or to couple a light source to a waveguide, this is especially the case. In these couplers, oftentimes a lens is employed to focus the exiting light so as to allow the light to enter a second waveguide without obstruction or loss. Positioning of such a lens is quite labor intensive, as are the subsequent steps of packaging the overall device, translating into a very high cost. This high cost impedes the overall creation of optical communications systems. Consequently, there is a need for a diffractive coupler that can be manufactured simply, thereby allowing such components to be manufactured at significantly reduced cost with low labor requirements.